I admit, I was not too interested in NBC’s “Emerald City,” miniseries project when the first few glimpses of it appeared online. It looks to be more “Game of Thrones,” or “Lord of the Rings,” than anything Ozzy. But yesterday several teaser posters were released to public through the website e-online. And one of those more than piqued my interest.

The NBC teaser poster for Tip, a brown skinned youth in a purple shirt and vest, wrapped in vines.

Tip, as fans of the books will know is the name Ozma was given in her cursed form as a boy. She is being portrayed here by Jordan Loughran, a British actress who has previously done work for the Disney Channel. Now if it was up to me, I wouldn’t cast a cis woman in the role of Tip, but the fact that they did so means it’s almost certain that they intend to reveal her as Ozma. That is something I am very much looking forward to. There has yet to be a major American studio project that keeps this, to me personally, very important part of the Oz mythos intact. So while I still have reservations about this series, I am very interested to see how they handle Tip/Ozma.

There was another thing I noticed about this poster; it very much reminds me of the first few seconds of the intro theme of the 70s anime “Rose of Versailles,” where the the camera pans up on the body of the main character Oscar as she is entwined in thorns. Now it might just be coincidence, but Oscar, in the story, is a woman who was raised from birth as if she was a boy, and part of her journey is coming to connect with her femininity. It certainly wouldn’t be the first anime homage on network television.

A compilation of the full shot of Oscar in the Rose of Versailles intro. Thorns wrapped around woman’s silhouette coloured in red